Collapsing Inward
by lock shock and barrel
Summary: They knew him, and they feared him. For they knew his story. oneshot, AU


The sun of August rose slowly over Paris, its heavy white blaze making a sacrifice of the skeletal corpses below. Vermin were roasted alive on the pavestones as the children of the street leapt like stags to save their bare feet. Bourgeois women fanned themselves daintily and complained about the heat as they sipped at their tea. And the summer progressed well in the city.

One of the underworld's children watched the fire from the shade of an alleyway, his lips curled upward in just the slightest grin. It was comical how the others ran from the summer, as if they could outrun the course of life. Laughable, almost. But the street rat never laughed. He often smiled. But never laughed. Brushing his curled locks out of his eyes, he inclined his head toward the beating sun and slid out of the shadows.

The underworld's children knew each other far too well. As discreetly as possible, they avoided the addition to their pack, for even with hat and hair concealing his face, the glint of a dagger is identification as anything else. The young man was a killer, swift with the blade; he could dance you to your death and Hell's bells would ring before you saw the line of blood across your neck. He had not always been so cruel, they whispered. Once he was a youth, bold and brazen, a gamin turned villain in the cold embrace of life. Those who once knew the boy shook their heads. Innocence could not live in the streets any more than a songbird could within a cage.

If the figure was at all fazed by the scorching heat, he did not show it. He walked like death, cold and fluid. Sweat did not cling to his brow or clothes, nor did his cheeks turn red and blotched. He is inhuman, they whispered, a devil's favorite, born of the streets and to die by the streets. Passing by the sun-dried park, the street rat was momentarily shaded by a familiar looming behemoth. The wooden skeleton of an elephant, long since abandoned by its inhabitant. Perhaps inside there still lay a meager straw mattress, and on it a patchy cat, content with devouring the rats that so foolishly crept inside the belly of the wooden beast. But it was doubtful. A single glance, and the street rat pressed on.

There was no purpose for the journey, he knew, but there was no purpose for life, either. Walking for days and living on crusts of stolen bread if the dogs don't take them first. It was hope, that ugly thing, that kept them all alive. The street rat sneered inwardly; he had had hope once, as a child. He knew why the sun rose and what the alley cats spoke of. Now, though, truth was far too close to him, touching him like the prostitutes on the streets, so pretty from afar, but when they come so close, the marks of age or knives or nails are seen through hopeless layers of rouge. They were truth. They did not bother him now. Then, they never had. Even as a youth he had conversed with them, given them a coin for bread and went along his way. He had been so young, he recalled with a distain so bitter it poisoned his tongue. It had been under the pressure of a friend. No, not a friend. A fellow thief, a criminal like the rest, for who was not a thief in the underworld? She had asked how old he was. _Fifteen_, the thief lied. He was nearly twelve then. He remembered how red her lips were, how her collarbone protruded. _I'm doing you a favor_, the thief had said. _You can be a man now_. Since then, he had taken many more women. Each time after it grew easier to numb the mind. Yet sometimes that warm autumn day returned, and he would be blind, and he would be kneeling over a dead woman.

Crazy, he thought, that he had been so scarred and terrified by the feel of calloused hands upon his body, when he had seen death and agony since childhood. Death had meant nothing to him. The sound of a gun and the sound of a scream were common breaks in the murmur of the gutter. The sight of a blind man begging for food could not bring the heart to sorrow; there were so many blind, so many begging. With each step of his boots, there was another. _Please_ step _Food_ step _Children_ step _Mercy_ step. In a few steps, they would be gone, and another to replace them. If he did not look at them, there were not there. Only the voices of ghosts. God, so many ghosts.

The street rat had resumed his position in the shadows. There was nothing to report. Those he had left breathed less sharply. They knew him far too well. He lived by the knife, murder was his mantra. This, they knew. He was turned to stone through life, gamin to villain to murderer. This, they had seen. He had had his first woman before his voice began to shift, and had killed his first woman before patches of sharp hair appeared on his face. This, they had heard. He had seen the students fall.

He was called Gavroche.

**A/n: Oh ho! If you guessed that one, then you win. This is obviously AU, since Gavroche hasn't been blown up by the National Guard. I thought I would play on the idea that Hugo showed Gavroche as a tragic character, who would one day become like Montparnasse if he hadn't gotten killed. Tell me what you think of it.**


End file.
